Information

Footnotes

According to Eurostat procedures the years of the table refer to the survey year, the year the survey was implemented. The income reference period is the previous tax year.

At-risk-of-poverty rate is the rate of individuals that fall under the at-risk-of-poverty threshold. The at-risk-of-poverty threshold is defined as 60% of the median equivalised disposable income. Equivalised disposable income depends on the disposable income of the household and how many people are living from that income. For instance, two adults with two children need 2.1 times more disposable income than a person who lives alone in order to have comparable disposable income. The at-risk-of-poverty rate in Iceland was for instance 9.8% in 2010.

The EU-SILC is a sample survey which must be taken into account when looking at the results. In order to evaluate the uncertainty due to sampling error confidence interval is calculated (CI). The interval reaches equally far below and above the number it applies to and is added to and subtracted from the number. If evaluated at-risk-of-poverty rate is 10% and the confidence interval is +/- 1.2 the lower limit is 8.8 and the upper limit is 11.2 given 95% confidence level and therefore it can be stated that in 95% of samples of equal size the result would fall within the given interval. When comparing two numbers in order to see if the difference between them is large enough to be statistically significant one needs to look a the confidence interval of both numbers and see if they cross each other.